January 1st, 2016:

Well, I’m back. Back from being incommunicado, mostly, and (almost) back from being nose-deep in boxes in dire need of emptying. I’m now not quite calf-deep in boxes, having emptied sixteen today alone, twelve of them boxes of books. Carol polished the last two Hundavad bookshelves yesterday, and today I filled them. I think there are maybe three more boxes of books, possibly four. Overall, I think fewer than 25 boxes remain to be emptied.

That’s serious progress.

Our biggest single problem for our first two weeks here was getting access to the Internet. Yes, we probably got more done per unit time without Facebook to mess with, but I don’t like being completely disconnected. Cox Cable had to run brand new coax from the node in the alley to the house. My guess is that the existing coax was damaged when the house was gutted to the walls in 2003 and rebuilt. (Bulldozers and Bobcat front-loaders can do that.) It took two weeks, during which we were eating out a lot at places with free Wi-Fi, especially Wildflower Bread Company but occasionally Einstein’s Bagels.

The previous owner had Dish, and evidently never used cable. He had coax outlets in every room in the house, including the master bathroom. All of it came together behind a panel in one of the walk-in closets. (Above.) Some cables are marked, many aren’t, and I have no clue what the unmarked cables are about. So, mostly, I’m ignoring them. We have little interest in TV to begin with, and I’m going to explore streaming from the Internet to our big wi-fi enabled Samsung TV. When the Cable Guy came yesterday morning to hook up the new coax, he found which cable from the ratsnest above went out to the box outside the house, dropped in a cable modem, and handed me a Cat 5E patch cord. I had literally hung an old Wireless G router on a nail next to the panel, and connected the four switch ports to the four Cat 5 sockets in the panel. (It’ll do until I get an 802.11ac router and build a more elegant mount for it.) I plugged in the patch cord, and It Just Worked.

Yeah, I know, it sounds lame, but it didn’t really feel like home here without broadband. Now it does. We don’t even have a kitchen table (we’re shopping) and have been eating all our at-home meals at the island breakfast bar, but it still feels like home. Bit by bit, other things are falling into place as well: I drilled and tapped two holes in a Linksys 5-port switch and made an aluminum bracket for it to hold it to my temporary computer table, and that helped. (Making my drill press turn over for the first time in who knows how many weeks felt peculiarly good.) But bottom line, it was broadband that did the trick.

Much remains to be done. I need to get my VHF discone assembled and mounted on the roof. We need to get a diningroom table. I need to wire my lathe to the new 220V feed in the wall beside it. My workshop needs, well, work. And then there are those 25 remaining boxes…

It’ll all get done.

Happy new year, everybody. There’s much to write, and I can (finally) see some quality writing time heaving up over the horizon. In the meantime, expect more Contra. Alas, expect some delay in my getting Ten Gentle Opportunities posted on Kindle. Life happens, and always takes longer than you expect.